IEEE Nanotechnolgy Newsletter - August 2006

The IEEE Nano2006 meeting held at the Westin hotel in downtown Cincinnati from July 17-20, 2006, was quite a success. Before I described in my own words my thoughts about the meeting, I would like you to read the summary statement from the general Chair, Cliff Lau from the Institute for Defense Analyses, A Bird's eye view of the IEEE nano 2006 meeting.

By the end of the meeting, there were close to 380 attendees, 280 of which were preregistered. It was nice to see that various professionals, teachers, and students from neighboring states registered on site.

The oldest participant was the keynote lecturer and Noble Prize winner, Prof. John Fenn from Virginia Commonwealth University. Prof. Fenn is co-recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The title of his presentation was
"Electrospray Wings For Nanoscale Elephants" . Below are two pictures of Prof. Fenn during the meeting, courtesy of Prof. Fukuda from Nagoya University. In the first picture, Prof. Fenn is surrounded by (left) Supriyo Bandyopadhyay (Program Co-Chair of the IEEE nano 2006) and (right) T.J. Tarn (Washington University in St Louis). In the bottom picture, from right to left, we have one (so far) unidentified participant, Prof. John Fenn, K.L. Wang (UCLA), and Supriyo Bandyopadhyay (Virginia Commonwealth University).
Our youngest participant was a sophomore from a nearby school in Cincinnati, Ian Daniher, only 14 years old! His mom told me that her son was very eager to learn more about carbon nanotubes, a subject he had been talking about for the last 12 months! This was quite unusual and somehow recomforting to see that the importance to study nanoscience and nanotechnology seems to have reached future generations of scientists and engineers at a fairly young age.

A symposium on nanoeducation was held on Monday, July 17, 2006 at the beginning of the afternoon before the second batch of a total of six short courses offered on that day. That symposium was attended by a crowd of about 100 people. Three of the talks were given by faculty members from the University of Cincinnati who are developing courses at the sophomore and dual levels in which students from a wide variety of majors (physics, chemistry, engineering) are exposed to the rudiments of nanoscience and nanotechnology. One extra talk was also given by Prof. Lyshevski from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Of the ten short courses initially planned, six were finally offered due to the lack of registrants for some of the short courses. The short courses given at the meeting included

  • S. Datta and M.S. Lundstrom, Purdue University
    "Nanoelectronics: Physics and Simulation".
  • D. Deppe, University Texas, Austin
    "Nanophotonics Devices Physics and Technology".
  • M. Dutta and M. Stroscio, UIC, Chicago
    "Integrating Nanoelectronics and Biology".
  • D. Melnikov, UIUC, Urbana
    "Nanostructure Spintronics".
  • M. Meyyappan, NASA Ames Research Center
    "Carbon Nanotube based Nanotechnology".
  • M. Yu, UIUC, Urbana
    "NEMS technology".
    There were about 90 people registered for the short courses with an average of 30 participants per course. The largest audience was for the short courses on carbon nanotube based nanotechnology, integrating nanoelectronics and biology, and nanobiology, and nanoelectronics: physics and simulation, with an attendance of around 40 to 50 people. The offering of two short courses for the price of one allowed to reach such a large audience and we strongly suggest that future meetings use the same approach since it seems to attract a lot of students.

    The poster session on Tuesday evening was well attended (we had a lot of ice cream for the participants and other goodies, another good idea to attract a crowd). A panel of judges recruited by Evelyn Hirt (Pacific Northwest Lab.) and Savas Kaya (Ohio University) organized a very efficient competition to select the winners of the "Best Student Poster" were announced during the banquet. They are B.W. Jacobs, Q. Chen, and A. Baczewski, who were co-authors of a paper entitled "Electronic Transport Characteristics of Gallium Nitride Nanowire-based Nanocircuits". The three students will received each a plaquette with their name on it. The award of $500 will be shared by the three students and was sponsored by the local section of the Electrochemical Society. Two more awards ("Best Student Presentation" and "Best Student Paper") were selected by a panel of judges recruited on site. The scored are being tabulated and the winners should be announced by mid-August. This newsletter will be upgraded with the names of the winners as soon as available.

    A total of 7 excursions were offered on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 19 2006. As many as 60 registrants opted to visit the campus of Cincinnati where they offered a tour of some of the nanofacilities at UC. The tour ended with a getogether in the Engineering Research Center where there was a small poster presentation by students working in various aspects of nanotechnology at UC.

    Having the reponsibility of program chair and chair of the local arrangment committees, I believe the meeting went very well. A large number of people told me so personally or via email, some of them saying that this was the best of the six IEEE Nano meetings they have attended so far. The hard work paid off and I would be more than willing to share my experience with organizers of future editions of the meeting to help them avoiding the numerous pitfalls I fell into during the organization of this meeting.

    To learn more about the meeting, please visit the website: IEEE Nano2006 website
    You can buy a CD-ROM which contain all the papers presented at the IEEE Nano 2006 meeting directly from IEEE:
    Link to IEEE site to order CDROMs.

    A special issue in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology with some of the papers presented at IEEE Nano 2006 is planned to be released later on this year. To keep everything on schedule, authors of papers which appear in the proceedings volume of IEEE Nano 2006 are encouraged to submit a regular full paper to the IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. The submitted papers will be subject to review by the Transactions editors. Instructions for submitting papers to the Transactions electronically can be found on the web at IEEE TNT website address. It is important for authors who plan to submit a paper to mention that the work is an extension of the work presented at IEEE Nano2006. To make this special issue viable, authors must submit their manuscript by the STRICT DEADLINE of August 31, 2006.

    IEEE Nano2007 will be held on July 23-26, 2007 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong SAR, China. For more information contact:

    Dr. Wen J. Li, General Co-Chair
    Director, Centre for Micro and Nano Systems
    Associate Professor, Dept. of Automation and Comp.-Aided Eng.
    The Chinese Unversity of Hong Kongi
    Email: wen@acae.cuhk.edu.hk

    During IEEE Nano 2006, I had the great pleasure to meet Teerachai "Nick" Pornsinsirirak, who is the general chair of IEEE-NEMS 2007, to be held at the National Nanotechnology Center, in beautiful Bangkok, Thailand. Nick had a very nice presentation during the IEEE Nano 2006 banquet to convince us that Thailand is definitely a place to go for business but also for vacation. In Nick's words: "Bangkok, the city of angel, is exciting and never sleeps. It is the cultural, educational, political and economical center of Thailand. Besides attending the conference, you will enjoy shopping at brand-name or discount stores, sight-seeing historical and cultural places, dining in fine Thai or international restaurants, and relaxing in wonderful aroma therapy Thai spas."

    Last but not least, the following information was given to me by Chennupati Jagadish, president elect of the Nanotechnology Council, to follow in Meyya Meyyappan's footsteps. The IEEE Nanotechnology Council is calling for nominations for the following three awards to be presented at IEEE NANO 2007 in Hong Kong:
  • Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology
  • Early Career Award in Nanotechnology
  • NTC Distinguished Service Award

    All nomination material including reference letters should reach the NTC awards committee by October 15 2006. Call for Nominations, Nomination Form and Awards Committee Roster can be found online at the ARCNN web page. Click here for the link: Call for nominations

    Please consider nominating your colleagues from academia as well as government and industry for these prestigious awards. Nominations (electronic and one hard copy) with supporting material can be sent to Prof Chennupati Jagadish, IEEE NTC Awards Committee, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, AUSTRALIA, Email: c.jagadish@ieee.org

    This newsletter will keep the same outline in forthcoming issues, which I plan to release about every three to four months. Some sections of the newsletter are intended to become useful glossaries and databases on various topics. Since I can only dedicate so much of time in achieving these goals, I will respectfully ask for your help by sending me your comments and any information which you think would make this newsletter a very useful piece of information for all its readers. One of my goals is to increase my database of email addresses for readers of this newsletter to 1,000 by the end of the year, and to eventually be able to have email addresses of as many as 5,000 interested readers by the end of 2007 when my term as editor of this newsletter will be over. I hope you will help me reaching these goals by letting me know the email addresses of people you think may be interested to read the contents of this newsletter and its various attachments. Your collaboration in reaching those goals is greatly appreciated.

    Sincerely yours,
    Marc Cahay
    marc.cahay@uc.edu